Raising a daughter with autism and a son born without a kidney was a struggle for Mike Porath, a former writer for the NBC Nightly News website. But when he heard from other parents struggling to raise children with severe autism, he was so inspired that he decided to share their stories. He founded startup TheMighty.com in the storage room of his La Crescenta house. The site publishes positive, uplifting stories in an online media market dominated by sensationalism. The site seems to have found an audience. For example, a recent story about a mother who took offense when she was indirectly asked by a cashier why she didn’t abort her Down syndrome child drew 2.5 million hits in 24 hours. “I don’t think I understood the power of stories until I started getting stories about people who had the same condition as my daughter,” said Porath, 39. “They were better than any piece of advice I’ve ever gotten from doctors.” The site mixes traditionally reported stories found by staff and reader content submitted online. Since going live in April 2014, it has drawn 3 million to 4 million visitors a month. That popularity helped the startup obtain $1.8 million in venture capital in the first quarter, including an undisclosed investment from New York angel Joanne Wilson – one of the first to write a check. “My initial reaction was content is so hard. We all love content as we consume it all day long, but as a business it is a whole other ball game,” Wilson said in a blog post on her site Gothamgal.com. “Then I saw The Mighty.” A little over a year into its launch, Themighty.com has a staff of 16 employees and a brand-new office in downtown Burbank where it posts about 20 stories daily. Megan Griffo is editor-in-chief for the website and its first employee. She said it only took two weeks for her to decide to leave her job at the Huffingtonpost.com and join The Mighty. “The overall theme to a lot of these stories is overcoming a challenge,” she said. The site is free and currently carries no advertising, but Porath plans to hire sales agents in the next six months. He expects interest from health care companies. Despite the good start, the web is littered with health-related sites that flourished for short periods, such as dr.koop.com. Mike Ananny, assistant professor of communications and journalism at USC, said that niche media sites face visibility and financial struggles. “How are they heard, how do they make a name for themselves, how do they stand out among all of this explosion of media content that is available?” Ananny said. Porath is aware of the media landscape, but he is convinced the stories that have helped him raise his daughter, now 8, and his son, 6, are the foundation of a solid media business. “Using stories, I think we can build the world’s largest community around people facing all these conditions,” he said. – Mateo Melero
